Even for Windows, Firefox is awesome... I left Netscape at version 6.0 (you know, the one with a ton of AOL bloat), and now it's the first time that I feel that a browser can compete with Explorer. It's fast, customizable, cute, compatible... and the extensions thing is just a greaaaaaat idea! Tabbed browsing is also the best thing since sliced bread...

GG for the win!:)

I didn't checked the other awards, not being a Linux guy... (at least, not for now!)

I love Firefox too since I started using it a few weeks ago. Only one question, though...to be considered in competitions like this, doesn't there have to be at least a 1.0 version? I mean, one could argue the playing field isn't level if it's not at 1.0 because it's not the officially, full-featured release version yet. What if Firefox 1.0 includes a bunch of bugs or implements requirements that make it far less desirable to use?

Even for Windows, Firefox is awesome... I left Netscape at version 6.0 (you know, the one with a ton of AOL bloat), and now it's the first time that I feel that a browser can compete with Explorer. It's fast, customizable, cute, compatible... and the extensions thing is just a greaaaaaat idea! Tabbed browsing is also the best thing since sliced bread...

Anyone know how progress is going on a mozilla port to AmigaOS? There's tens of thousands more potential users out there, mozilla developers, who are clamo

Even the acronym itself in "implemented" inconsistently: the article expands it to Really Simple Syndication, the (I think) original and official meaning is RDF Site Summary (where RDF:= Resource Description Framework) and IBM, among others, expands it to Rich site summary. Source: Google Definitions [google.com].

How is my post a flamebait? I was used to the original RDF site summary definition, and surprised to see there were others... Naming conventions nonwithstanding, I still like RSS and use it a lot now that my browser [opera.com] is RSS-enabled.

Well, first of all, note the smiley! Basically, there was a big flamewar about RSS around the release of RSS 2.0. Dave Winer wanted something that was really simple, whereas a whole lot of other people wanted RSS to be the first real Semantic Web application.

RSS as in RSS 2.0 stands for Really Simple Syndication, while when the R in RSS stands for RDF, we're talking Semantic Web.

So, if you had mentioned the two in the wrong fora at the wrong points in time, it would invariably have set off a huge flamew

Well, RDF is something totally different: It's a W3C standard that has a much larger vision than simply RSS. It's used for semantic web and FOAF type of projects but the applications are about unlimited with some imagination.
Anyway, I found that giving an award to RSS as a game was quite a good joke. What kind of geek plays games anyway?

Another weird thing about RSS is version numbering. Version 0.91 is completely different from 1.0 which is completely differnt from 2.0, but 0.91 and 2.0 look very much the same.

As far as I could understand from the articles I needed to read so I coud create my own RSS feed, one of the standards is just plain XML (0.91, 2.0), while the other is xml-serialized RDF and they are also specified by two different groups of people.

And the end result is a really nice mess.(But then, those articles could be wrong

audacity is a soundfile editor, ardour is a digital audio workstation. you can do some of the same things in each - record audio, chop it up, apply FX and so forth - but they are not equivalent in a deeper sense.

ardour is modelled on proaudio apps like protools, nuendo and samplitude. its not intended to be used for simple editing tasks, but for complex multi-track, multi-channel audio work. we hope that its UI will evolve to make the simple stuff simple, but our initial goal has been to make sure we have an internal architecture that can do anything the high-end proprietary apps can do, and more.

if you don't know how the high-end tools work, ardour will seem very very complex (and the current lack of a manual won't help much with that). if you have used protools, ardour will seem relatively familiar to you, although we attempt to take best-of-breed features from all the other DAWs. otoh, DAWs have all pretty converged on the same core feature set, so the differences have more to do with GUI nuances than functionality.

I'll offer this comment about Ardour; I'm the author of Postfish, Ogg and a regular contributor to Audacity. I've been hearing good thigns about Ardour for more than a year and have thus tried repeatedly to try it out.

a) No manual. No usable manual anyway. I know no one who uses it, so I have no 'live' manual to get me going either. Lots of apps don't have good manuals, but this goes along with b...

b) 'Angry fruit salad' user interface. Lots of functionality [apparently] brilliantly obfuscated by a million buttons in every imaginable color grouped randomly with no real UI intuitiveness to make up for the missing manual. I'm no newbie to pro audio; recording and mastering soundtrack CDs for local theatre groups is one of my pasttimes. But I cannot figure out how to even get started. I spend about an hour on step one every couple of months and have never succeeded in getting it to do anything with the 400G of raw digital audio sitting on my box.

The end result is that I've been unable to figure out how to find the most rudimentary starting-out functions. I already have all my audio; Ardour is too heavy to run on my portable recording boxes-- I have beaverphonic already doing my HD recording for the past several years-- so how do I do anything using Ardour with audio I already have? The manual's tutorials all begin with 'press the record button...' The FAQ says I can use it with my recordings, but the UI and manual conspire to convince me none of that functionality actually exists.

All this *is* a flame-- Ardour is supposedly good software but all it's done is waste my time and for that reason I'm annoyed-- but it's also a genuine request of the Ardour authors to help out all us poor folks that aren't Ardour hackers to get started. I'd love to see what this package can do and give it a fair shake.

i'm not sure its worth going into this here, since monty and i have shared our fair share of flames and discussions on irc.

all i can say right now is that i don't like the fact that we have no manual, but that i have worked my ass off on this project for 4 years, and there is a limit to what i can do. and because i want to use the blender model (software: $$ free, manual: revenue source), its not really feasible for other people to write The Manual. however, i can't stop other people from writing manual

recouping the costs over 4-5 years has never been the goal. just making a modest living continuing to do this kind of work is.

the manual is not the only element in the revenue strategy - i would be stupid if i believed that could ever work. but its a significant element. i've already been approached by another moderately well-known open source-related publisher about doing the manual as "a book".

the main point of me doing the manual is to give people something tangible when they pay to get ardour. su

I will point out that many pro sound engineers are not also even more pro computer people. I help write DAW software... and couldn't figure out how to work on an existing file without you telling me. Most people who try out Ardour won't complain if they can't get it to work. The majority tends to give up and wander away; that's a problem for all of us.

[also, a disclaimer. I'm only 'semi-pro'; I take money but don't pretend to live on it as a career. That said, I do have an annoying penchant for expens

all true. but here's my favorite story for this department. pro-audio-engineer but non-computer user buys Digital Performer and a G5. installs RME hammerfall. tries to record 8 tracks straight in from an ADAT.

there's no audio signal.

to test, user drags audio file into session. cool, region appears. test playback. no signal and no meters. no amount of anything will produce output.
user switches to builtin audio. still no output.

2hrs later, after a support phone call, it is revealed that regions der

For what it is worth, I think your program is awesome. Yes, some UI work would be great at some point, but high-end software in any industry tends to be complex because the functions being performed are complex. I don't think there is anything on linux that can touch what you are doing for the high-end pro audience. As a recording hobbyist who gets to use pro-quality software for free, I could not be happier:)

I don't actually object to that development model in any way; there's nothing unreasonable about it, and I've strongly considered it myself.

I was complaining about one and only one thing: For the life of me, I can't figure out how to make it do *anything*. The number of buttons has nothing to do with this; most of my physical control surfaces have even more physical buttons than six copies of Ardour.

If I knew it would give me something my current tools don't, great! I'd happily buy the manual and figure

create an audio track, then drag the audio in from a good file manager, or set the edit point to where you want the audio to start, right click in the tracking area to bring up a context menu, then go to edit, then insert external sndfile.

Paul did actually say you could drag things in somewhere in this thread I think.

And while I have the chance, thank you for all the things xiph has done.

there is no notion of "opening" an existing file, because ardour isn't
a soundfile editor. you work with sessions, which may contain hundreds
or thousands or files (or just one, if you wish). so the first thing
you have to do, as indicated by the big message in the editor window,
is to create a new session (Session->New).

because ardour (like other DAWs) uses a track-based metaphor, you then
have to create 1 or more tracks in which to place the audio you want
to work with. in anything less than curre

do you know why Protools looks the way it does? because they have hundreds of beta testers and serious users offering them feedback at every step of their game. there isn't one thing in PT that hasn't been driven by user feedback - that may be good or bad, but it does mean that the UI is driven by user demands.

second, there is no "MS world" here - the flagship DAWs all started life on the Mac. hell, 4 years ago, PT was only certified to run on a *single* intel-based system (from IBM).

There's a good reason why alot of user-application software happens first on systems like the Mac or Windows and comes to Linux second. It all has to do with what's a commodity and what isn't. The OS is a commodity (always was, actually, although people haven't realized that until lately). Text editors are a commodity. Web servers are a commodity. So are browsers. MP3 encoders are another.

These are all things that, for the most part, people are no longer willing to pay money for. For that reason, yo

From Article-"Any hardware whose speed gets compared to greased rodents is at least worthy of an honorable mention, and Greg Kroah-Hartman made that comparison in his vote for the dual-processor version of the Apple Power Mac G5, which is one Linux install away from being a great system. "It's fast, quiet and pretty to look at. With full 64-bit goodness for a very cheap price, what's not to like?" he wrote. "

One linux install away? I realize this is the linux editors journal, but what about having OSX inst

Is anybody else unhappy with some of the changes in GIMP2? For me, several useful things have disappeared (like ctrl-T to hide the layer's borders, now it's something else and I have to go in the menu), of the fact that the "anti" tool key modifier is now ALT and not SHIFT anymore (apart for the magnifier, go figure...) and so it creates problems with KDE, it doesn't save the tablet's device status,... the list is endless.

All in all, I wonder why they voted GIMP. It's become less good and less usable than GIMP1, and certainly less than Photoshop overall anyway.

If you don't like the shortcuts, change them!At least in X11, you can point your mouse at the option youwant changed, then press the key combination you prefer.For example, open the menu at "Save as..", press Ctrl+A,and now Ctrl+A is your shortcut for "Save as..".It's what makes Gtk+ good:)

That won't help. The modifiers are not keyboard shortcuts, and cannot be changed that way. I haven't been able to find a way to do so, and while I am definately agree with the gnome philosophy of minimizing configurability to what is useful,that really is a necisarry configuration if you want nice integrate into different environments.

Well, the constant crashes on the Windows version aren't an ideal advertisement for free software...

The interface seems about the same though... not particularly easier to use, not particularly harder to use... It's the same tools and panels that were always available, so I wouldn't really expect any great productivity gains from rearranging them.

This isn't a flame, I'm curious whether my aesthetics are different to the majority. Also everything I've read and heard says IBM laptops rock, which I don't doubt. I'd love to have a Thinkpad X31

However, does anyone else find the design of all IBM Thinkpads to be absolutely butt ugly? Yes they're distinctive & not just another silvery Powerbook ripoff, but they just look so cheap and plasticy - like something out of the bargain bin.

I totally agree (from all reports, I've no longterm direct experience) that they're sturdy, robust, of high build quality and generally good.

I just don't think they look it, to me the rubberised black with red trim looks awful - it reminds of how 'portable computers' looked in the pre-pentium days. It doesn't look the part compared to just about any other laptop.

All Thinkpads look like that since the very first model from 1992 [aichi.to]: a rectangular black slab with a small logo on the corner in RGB. Thinkpads are not designed to attract attact attention to themselves. Powerbooks are basically designed make you advertise for Apple whenever you're working on them. Even the logo is upside down, so that everybody around you sees it in the "correct" position.

The ThinkPad T41 is currently priced at $2,522.13 [ibm.com] . They couldn't find another laptop that is more cost effective than that? One of the benefits of Linux is first the OS is free, but also it doesn't require the Spartan hardware of Windows. For $2,522.13 I could simple get one of these [apple.com] and not worry about getting sound drivers etc. to work.

That's funny. This [ibm.com]
is what Google found me, as I also rushed to check the marvel laptop:) Note however that this configuration is 1.4 GHz instead of 1.7 and a 40 GB HDD instead of a 60 GB one.

Thinkpads and Powerbooks are the top-of-the-line laptops available today. Period. Which you go for is substantially a matter of taste, but my brother (who bought a powerbook) has been coveting my thinkpad T40 (third thinkpad model I've owned) more than a little lately, OSX notwithstanding.

Reuven points out that the all-in-one social network sites LinkedIn, Orkut and Ryze aren't particularly useful, but he says they're "all scratching the surface of something new and interesting."

Bull. There's nothing older; a friend invited me to join friendster, and my first comment to her was:

"Jesus Christ, it's high school, all over again."

It's an electronic popularity contest, with a little bit of recruitment thrown in. Most of us sit on the sidelines and watch as the really popular people amass a huge collection of friends.

Not surprisingly, a huge number of these young 20-somethings were from NYC, and almost all of them were exactly the type I can't stand- drunk-every-night clubbers. My personal favorite was some rich-bitch french girl who was almost completely naked in all of her shots on some beach. Her profile was truly a piece of work. Example: "Things I enjoy: Not having to work. Ever."

Friendster attracts the biggest concentration of intellectual-stuck-ups, prisses, and vanity-obsessed people I've seen in my life. Given Orkut is higher profile and more exclusive, I would imagine it's even worse.

the MySQL team is making impressive inroads, and I expect to see them close the gap with PostgreSQL in the coming years

He should take a look at the list of new features in the upcoming version of PostgreSQL which includes savepoints, point in time recovery, tablespaces and a bunch of smaller stuff. Meanwhile, MySQL folks are still struggling with some features which were supported by Postgres almost a decade ago. I'd say the gap is getting bigger, not smaller. Much bigger!

Postgresql is awsome but so are firebird and sapdb. This year ingres from CA is about to be open sourced. I have never used it but it's certainly an enterprise ready database.

If you ask me the people at mysql should abandon their quest to make mysql into postgres. Every feature you add is just going to make it slower and more complicated so why not leave mysql as the lightweight, fast alternative to full featured databases I listed above.

people at mysql should abandon their quest to make mysql into postgres

I haven't seen much evidence that MySQL wants to be like PostgreSQL.

My impression is that MySQL outright rejects many fundamental philosophies of PostgreSQL. For instance, in MySQL, it's legal to enter the date Feb 31st. I'm confident that the MySQL developers could fix that, but their philosophy is to put the responsibility into the application. MySQL also has the philosphy that if an error is encountered, keep going.

The folks at mysql are busy adding things like stored procedures, triggers and all kinds of doodads. They already have sapdb so why bother. Keep mysql what it is. A lightweight sql interface for the filesystem.

(2) It has a new caching algorithm which should significantly improve the cache hit rate in most real-world situations. Specifically, they are changing from a "least-recently updated" algorithm (LRU) to a system that accounts for how often the page was accessed. In the old caching system, if a large table scan was done, the cache would be polluted and your small, frequently-accessed table wouldn't be in cache.

Congratulations to GnuCash on winning the "Desktop Software" category.

Nice to see some recognition for one of the most unglamorous and underappreciated of all the major free software projects. Originally a Quicken user, I started feeling disempowered by its mandatory activation/registration (in the Australian edition) and reports from other users that the next version displayed advertising (of Quicken's services). It made me angry enough to search for alternatives, and I was sufficently motivated to create a partition for GNU/Linux specifically so that I could use GnuCash once a week. Not something I'd expect Joe User to do, but experienced Windows tinkerers like myself can certainly handle it, and the experience will also make my eventual switch to Linux easier. I've seen where Windows and proprietary software is pushing the industry (toward DRM, software patents, more products needing activation, etc.) and I don't like it one bit. But I digress...

I would like to comment that GnuCash is frequently criticised as being too difficult for personal finances because of the "double-entry" system it uses. People who don't know better see the words "double entry" and the first thing they think (incorrectly) is "WTF, I have to enter each transaction TWICE?!". Please stop scaring people away with this FUD because, in a practical sense, GnuCash's double-entry foundation is of little consequence to former users of Quicken or similar programs. All it means is that everything that Quicken calls a "category" is an "account" instead. The power of the centuries old accounting practice is there if you need it, but in day to day use there's hardly a difference. Some people believe that GnuCash is more difficult to use than Quicken, but this has more to do with others things (perhaps its interface and the fact that it's also intended to cater to business users).

I admit, I was one of the folks frightened away by the term "double-entry bookkeeping", so I started using CBTracker instead. It's a nice little checkbook program that's simpler than Quicken but is quite adequate for most people.

I am a subscriber of the magazine and frankly found their choice of "game" abysmal since what they chose is not a game, no matter how they want to spin it.

I think Linux game developpers, that are fighting one of the most ungrateful tasks to make a Linux desktop a reality, should not be thrilled by being blantantly ignored by people that are suppossed to be knowledgable about Linux.

If the LJ editors do not use games, then the honorable choice would have been to either not to give an award or to delegate the selection on people knowledgable about this field.

Of all the possible choices they took the worst: to insult the intelligence of their readers and of Linux game developpers.

Amazing they didn't pick one of the "Linux Certified" models like the LC2430. [linuxcertified.com] I would have figured a better standing for a company that specializes in Linux Laptops instead of just one that you can install Linux on.

... and also note that mysql wants to charge you a fee if you use it in your business (if it ever makes a difference in your revenue) regardless of whether or not you want support.

postgresql and firebird are both free for personal -and- corporate use, as I recall. they're both slower for the sorts of things mysql users usually want (retrieve by id, grab entire slice of the db to post-process in app code), but both enforce constraints, have stored procedures, good transaction handling (a comment above says